


Buried

by pollutedstar



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: M/M, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-25
Updated: 2020-02-25
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:49:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22888723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pollutedstar/pseuds/pollutedstar
Summary: “There is a new man in town,” Cecil says.Cecil says much about this new man, but he doesn’t say that he would curl up in the dirt of this man’s mouth and happily lay there for eternity. Crypts are more intimate than most people realize.
Relationships: Carlos/Cecil Palmer
Comments: 9
Kudos: 60





	Buried

“Turn on the radio,” the team commands in unison, and for some reason Carlos doesn’t find this strange. “Turn on the radio,” the team commands in unison, as if they are in charge and he is here to help their research project, their studies on the faultiness of our understanding of humanity, their pet project that may just have found a Bermuda triangle for time itself. “Turn on the radio,” the team commands, and Carlos realizes the radio is already on. Wasn’t he listening to music as white noise for his work? When did a man start talking? When did the channel change? Why is someone describing him?

“-teeth like a military cemetary,” the man on the radio purrs, and Carlos feels bodies in his mouth.

He left wherever he came from two weeks ago, yet he had only found this small desert town today. He doesn’t remember if he meant to come here, but he remembers his feet sinking into dry sand when he had gotten out of his car, and he remembers knowing with sudden clarity that someone wanted him here. _Where is Huntokar when you need her?_ a silent voice sang to him before running away.

Carlos likes a mystery, and he likes being a mystery. He doesn’t like his parents doting on him, and he will often stare at vile liquids inside of pristine vials and wonder why he doesn’t just drink it down and make himself the experiment. He has a degree in something, and knows what a cigarette tastes like, which is why he never smokes. His nightmares always involve a glowing purple eye that he chases and chases and chases, but it drowns before he can catch it. He is a collection of human experiences and fears that make the foundation of this town, and if horror is what waters the plants in these parts, he wonders how everything is so dead.

“Who is this?” he asks his team, his voice croaking like it has been buried in dirt.

“The Voice of Night Vale,” a woman answers, and the rest of the team hisses at her. Did they always have canines where their front teeth should be?

“Cecil,” the rest of them correct. _“Cecil.”_

This voice is not singing. He wonders what the man is like when he sings. He wonders if the man knows who Huntokar is. Carlos forgets about Huntokar as soon as the name enters his mind. He has other things to consume him, he decides, letting one thing be a mystery for now.

...

“What’s he like?” Old Woman Josie asks Cecil, who’s touching her front porch light with a perverse hope that he might one day understand its secrets.

“He has a square jaw, and-”

“Oh honey, you know I listen to the Voice. What’s he like, though?”

Cecil hesitates. He often struggles to find the place between the Voice of Night Vale and the gangly man with no color to his skin or hair. Although that's not quite true, he thinks as he watches the ink on his arms turn a darker and darker violet until they are almost black as he keeps his hand on the light. His tattoos had appeared one loud night with so much pain he hadn’t had it in him to scream. It had been harder to leave the station since then, harder to know what to say when his mouth wasn’t pressed to a microphone. One of his tattoos reads “On Air,” but it never turns off. Josie snaps at him, and his hands pull away from her light. His tattoos return to their natural purple.

“His lab coat is filthy. He won’t meet my gaze when we talk, and I wonder if he’s embarrassed. His eyes have these little black circles at the center, like you do, and he’s probably uncomfortable about it. I hope he’s not, though, because his voice may be…” his cheeks get hot, and he sees their light reflection against Josie’s glasses, “incredible, but it’s his eyes that really change when he talks about science. He likes the town. I want him to keep liking the town.”

Josie smiles, patting her hand on her rocking chair.

A hiss settles through the house that is Not An Angel, and Cecil hates lying to the town, so he turns away before he can see the Angel That Is Not An Angel, and he lifts his hand to Josie.

“Goodnight,” he murmurs to her, walking away in a hurry.

“City Council knows what that boy can do with his voice. That’s why they keep ‘im quiet,” he hears her tell her Not Angel, and his pace grows quicker.

...

Carlos often feels like he should exist, but that he probably doesn’t. He looks in the mirror in his bathroom and reaches out, wanting to touch the strange man he sees reflected, the man who has black hair that has never, before yesterday, been called perfect. His fingers will come millimeters away from the mirror before stopping. He suspects he exists. He doesn’t want to risk finding out it’s not true.

He sits on the steps of the house in the new development Desert Creek. His hands are cracked like the old walls of a house, but he’s young with no one living inside with him. He’s a person, not a home, and he resides somewhere in his heavy bones and dark skin.

Carlos doesn’t notice the man coming up to him until he’s no longer alone on the steps of a house that doesn’t exist. It’s the man from the day before, the radio man who sounds nothing like he does on the radio, the one who has no pupils or whites around his eyes, which seems to be made up for by the fact that his skin looks like a well-kept corpse, imitating life to the best of his ability and still falling just short.

The most lively thing about him is his clothes, but Carlos doesn’t know if he’s simply out of the Night Vale fashion loop, so he doesn’t comment on the neon vines sewn into Cecil’s button-up. He doesn’t have time to, anyway, because the man starts talking with his voice that sounds nothing like it does on the radio.

“I stayed up all last night, and the sun rose at the wrong time,” he begins excitedly.

Carlos nods. “We have a timer for that. It rose seventeen minutes early, set over a period of four seconds, and then rose again, this time twenty-two minutes late.” He registers what Cecil said, glancing over to him and avoiding his unnerving eyes. “You didn’t have to stay up all night.”

He shrugs, smiling happily. “I don’t sleep,” he tries to comfort. Pulling out two coffees that had not been in his hands before, Cecil pushes a cup into Carlos’ hand. Something inside of it moves, and Carlos almost drops it, but instead sets it aside as Cecil takes a drink from his. “Do you sleep?” he asks as casually as if he’s asking the traffic situation uptown. He tries to look at Carlos, but Carlos nervously glances away.

“I really like your eyes,” Cecil bursts out, which makes Carlos turn to him and see a purple glow emanating from his cheeks. “Sorry,” he mumbles. “That’s not how I meant it to come out. I just… I notice you don’t look me in the eyes very often. And even if you don’t like the black dots, I think they’re really neat!”

Carlos doesn’t know what to say, so me stutters out, “They’re called pupils.”

“Are they genetic?”

“No, they’re--” Carlos starts, before choking down the word “normal.” Instead, he restarts. “It’s just that, with pupils, you can see where I’m looking. I can’t tell when you’re looking at me.”

“I am.” Cecil turns purple again. “I mean. I mean when um, when we’re talking. You can assume I’m. Looking at you,” he murmurs.

Carlos thinks back to Cecil describing his hair as perfect, and there is suddenly more in this coffee stop than just squirming beverages. Carlos realizes with sudden clarity that he is real, he must be real, because if he were just a creative figment of some false god his hands would not be sweating so profusely.

He changes the subject.

“Have you lived in Night Vale your whole life? Has time always been wrong?”

“I’ve always lived in Night Vale.”

That doesn’t answer Carlos’ second question, but he doesn’t press. “How long have you worked for the radio?”

“Oh, forever,” Cecil waves jokingly, but a confusion sets in his eyes before he blinks heavily. How Carlos can read Cecil’s emotions out of pools of lavender is a mystery, but Carlos likes mysteries. “Probably longer than that,” he says more seriously.

Both of them fall suddenly silent. Carlos’ mouth feels muddied. Cecil’s eyelids feel heavy. They are waiting to be buried, but they don’t know where.


End file.
